Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Assignment 1: Tutor Feedback

My tutor provided valuable feedback and very timely, for that many thanks...

Overall the assignment was well received, comments being in the good to excellent range, so I am happy to have gotten a good start to the more formal aspects of the course.

The weakest of the 9 pairs were:

Hard-Soft: The contrast was not immediately visible from the image pair, it need the commentary to explain why the images represented hard and soft.  I agree, I pushed the concept to far, and got carried away in the story rather than the imagery.  A closer crop of the bags would yield a softer image.  What I wanted to show here was how the passage of time can transform a hard unyielding object into something soft and pliable.  The back story to this made it more compelling to me.  A better selection of subject would have been to take an apple and photograph it as it slowly rotted.  I did originally think of this, but rejected it due to the time commitment and that my concept would have attracted the flies

Smooth-Rough: The weakness here was more in the execution and perhaps poor choice of subject.  The concept was good, but I struggled to find pebbles/stones that looked soft in the large and rough in detail.  I did think about using soft focus or very shallow DoF to smooth the pebbles, but felt this would have been a cheat.  The final smooth image worked OK, but the rough image was too fine a detail

Much-Little:  Here the concept was strong, timing was the limitation.  I made multiple attempts at this combination, photographing a variety of situations, however, at a certain point I needed to complete the work and call it a wrap.  This is one where I really was frustrated by the lack of subject matter.  Normally the city is full of people asking for a coin or two.  The image I used was the best of a limited selection, now that the Oktoberfest is over the city is once again full of people asking for money, grrr....

The real pity was the following image:



When I took it, my thought was YES, got the image, on the camera back it looked fine - when I got home it was blurred.  This was exactly what I wanted from Much/Little, the guy playing guitar had no socks and was really run down (the music was scary) and the man with the kids had so much.  This was what I wanted, but it was a fleeting  moment and my technique really let me down.

Otherwise my tutor was of the opinion that I do not have enough comment in the blog around my thought process and also what didn't work and why.  I am trying to work that in now, although in some of the projects the brief is very simple and it can be hard to talk around the subject.

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